Théodore Flournoy
1853–1920 · Swiss psychologist and physician
Théodore Flournoy (Geneva, 1854 – Geneva, 1920) was a physician, psychologist and professor at the University of Geneva, where he held the chair of physiological and experimental psychology. He worked at a time when psychology was trying to break away from philosophy and become a laboratory science, and his name is linked to the scientific study of mediumship and psychical phenomena.
He trained in medicine at Strasbourg, though he never practised, and spent time in Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt. Influenced by William James's pragmatism, he wrote about spiritism and occult phenomena. His best-known book, From India to the Planet Mars (1900), drew on years of observation of the medium Hélène Smith, who in trance recounted supposed past lives. Flournoy argued that these were products of subliminal imagination, that is, of the unconscious mind, rather than messages from spirits.
His influence reached Carl Gustav Jung, who studied his cousin, the medium Hélène Preiswerk, for his 1902 doctoral thesis, and who took from Flournoy the notion of creative imagination and the case of Miss Miller for later work. Flournoy also wrote The Philosophy of William James (1911).
Key ideas
- Subliminal imagination: the medium's accounts were creations of the unconscious mind rather than revelations from another world.
- Long-term case study: he proposed studying one person over a long period to understand psychical phenomena rigorously.
- Experimental psychology: he held that mental phenomena, even the strangest, should be examined with scientific methods.
- Pragmatism: his approach drew on William James's idea of judging beliefs by their practical and psychological effects.
Curiosities
A laboratory fire
His first university laboratory later caught fire. According to tradition, he wrote to William James that he was not too upset, as he was growing tired of experimental research.
Five years of transcriptions
According to the sources, he copied down everything the medium said in trance over five years, and that material became the basis of his best-known book.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.